Automated personal assistants such as Google Now, Microsoft Cortana, Siri, M and Echo aid users in productivity-related tasks, e.g., planning, scheduling and reminding tasks or activities. In this paper we study one such feature of Microsoft Cortana: user-created reminders. Reminders are particularly interesting as they represent the tasks that people are likely to forget. Analyzing and better understanding the nature of these tasks could prove useful in inferring the user’s availability, aid in developing systems to automatically terminate ongoing tasks, allocate time for task completion, or pro-actively suggest (follow-up) tasks.

Prospective memory

Studying things that people tend to forget has a rich history in the field of social psychology. This type of memory is called “Prospective memory” (or more poetically written: “Remembrance of Things Future“). One challenge in studying PM is that its hard to simulate in a lab study (the hammer of choice for social psychologists). For this reason, most studies of PM have been restricted to “event-based” PM, i.e., memories triggered by an event, modeled in a lab through having someone perform a mundane task, and doing a special thing upon being triggered by an event. Furthermore, the focus in these studies has largely been on retention and retrieval performance of “artificial” memories: subjects were typically given an artificial task to perform. Little is known about the type and nature of actual, real-world, “self-generated” tasks.

Enter Cortana. The user logs we study in this paper represent a rich collection of real-life, actual, self-generated, time-based PM instances, collected in the wild. Studying them in aggregate allows us to better understand the type of tasks that people remind themselves about.

Big data

(Yes, sorry, that heading really says big data…) As the loyal reader may have guessed, this paper is the result of my internship at Microsoft Research last summer, and one of the (many) advantages of working at Microsoft Research is the restricted access to big and beautiful data. In this paper we analyze 576,080 reminders, issued by 92,264 people over a period of two months (and we later do prediction experiments on 1.5M+ reminders over a six month time period). Note that this is a filtered set of reminders (a.o. for a smaller geographic area, and we removed all users that only issued a few reminders). Furthermore, when analyzing particular patterns, we filter data to patterns commonly observed across multiple users to study behavior in aggregate and further preserve user privacy: we are not looking at the users behavior at the individual level, but across a large population, to uncover broad and more general patterns. So what do we do to these reminders? The paper consists of three main parts;

1. Task type taxonomy: First, we aim to identify common types of tasks that underlie reminder setting, by studying the most common reminders found in the logs. This analysis is partly data-driven, and partly qualitative; as we are interested in ‘global usage patterns,’ we extract common reminders, defined as reminders that are seen across many users, that contain a common ‘action’ or verb. We do so by identifying the top most common verb phrases (and find 52 verbs that cover ~61% of the reminders in our logs), and proceed by manually labeling them into categories.

2. Temporal patterns: Next, we study temporal patterns of reminders, by looking at correlations between reminder creation and notification, and in temporal patterns for the terms in the reminder descriptions. We study two aspects of these temporal patterns: patterns in when we create and execute reminders (as a proxy to when people typically tend to think about/execute certain tasks), and the duration of the delay between the reminder’s creation and notification (as a proxy to how “far in advance” we tend to plan different things).

3. Predict! Finally, we show how the patterns we identify above generalize, by addressing the task of predicting the day at which a reminder is likely to trigger, given its creation time and the reminder description (i.e., terms). Understanding when people tend to perform certain tasks could be useful for better supporting users in the reminder process, including allocating time for task completion, or pro-actively suggesting reminder notification times, but also for understanding behavior at scale by looking at patterns in reminder types.

Findings

As always, no exhaustive summary of the paper point-by-point here, straight into some of our findings (there’s much more in the paper):

We tend to plan for things (i.e., set reminders) at the end of day, and execute them (i.e., reminders trigger) throughout the day, which suggests the end of day is a natural moment for people to reflect upon the tasks that need to be carried out.

The types of things we remind ourselves about are mostly short-term, immediate, tasks such as performing daily chores.

People are more likely to call their mom, and email their dad.

Want to know more? See the taxonomy? See more pretty plots? Look at some equations? Learn how this could improve intelligent assistants? Read the paper!

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👋 Hello

I am a lead data scientist at the FD Mediagroep, where I lead a team of four data scientists on the award winning BNR SMART Radio, and FD’s SMART Journalism projects. I obtained my PhD in Information Retrieval at ILPS (at the University of Amsterdam) in 2017 under supervision of prof. dr. Maarten de Rijke.